The River That Burned, and the Law That Followed

The Cuyahoga River caught fire on June twenty-second, nineteen sixty-nine. The fire lasted approximately thirty minutes. By the time a photographer arrived, it was out. There are no known photographs of the nineteen sixty-nine fire.

Time magazine published an article on the burning river in August of that year, and used a dramatic photograph of flames leaping from the water. The photograph was taken in nineteen fifty-two, during a different, larger fire. The Cuyahoga had burned at least a dozen times between eighteen sixty-eight and nineteen sixty-nine. The nineteen fifty-two fire caused over a million dollars in damage. The nineteen sixty-nine fire was comparatively small.

None of that determined what happened next. The image, the moment, and a growing national anxiety about environmental destruction combined to make the nineteen sixty-nine fire something it had not quite been on its own: a symbol. Time's description of the river as one where a person "does not drown but decays" entered the national consciousness. Mayor Carl Stokes appeared on the cover of Time in conjunction with the story. The people who had been making factual arguments about the Cuyahoga's water quality for a generation, the communities living next to the discharge pipes, the workers in the neighborhoods along the river, did not get cover stories.

Earth Day was organized for April of nineteen seventy. The Environmental Protection Agency opened in December of that year. Congress passed the Clean Water Act in nineteen seventy-two, overriding President Nixon's veto.

The Cuyahoga Valley became a national park in two thousand. Fish have returned to the river. In March of two thousand nineteen, Ohio environmental officials announced that fish in the Cuyahoga were safe to eat. A symbol, even an imprecise one built on a borrowed photograph, can change the law.